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 ever passed. With all its bloodshed and violent excesses, and in spite of the reaction which quickly followed it in the rise of Napoleon, the Revolution finally destroyed a disastrous method of government, and freed the people from the worst forms of oppression which had grown up in the long reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Voltaire did not live to see this tremendous change; he would have deplored its violence, but his responsibility for the growth of the ideas which made such a thing possible was by no means small.

A. P.